Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday March 31, 2012 @05:14PM
from the go-hither-go-yon dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Notch posted the official page of Mars Effect today, saying through Twitter, 'it's a completely different game! Our takes place in space, and focuses on characters, and lets you land on planets!!' He gives more detailed on the new website, noting the game will be based around hard science fiction (think Star Trek sci-fi) and puts characters in control of a character rather than just a ship. Similar to Minecraft, it will be a free-roaming game, but with a full economic system, different planets, customizable ships, space battles against AI, and other features. There will also be an in-game, 16-bit computer. Notch also took the chance to poke fun at Mass Effect, noting it will have 'A game ending that makes sense.'"

Damn it. I was going to complain about the hard SF / Star Trek thing myself, and it only takes two posts to realise I'm an idiot. (Mind you, knowing the way Notch works, even if this is a gag it'll probably end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both

Mass effect was pretty much the closest thing to "hard sci fi" I've encountered in a video game. A google search for "hard sci fi videogames" came up with two yahoo questions asking if there were any, mass effect was mentioned in both as the closest examples of it, so I'm not alone in that opinion. There was a scientific explanation in the codex (text that got added under a menu nearly every time you encountered something new in the game) that was surprisingly detailed. You could just play the game and ignore the explanations, but in case you were wondering why your guns overheated but never ran out of ammo in ME1, there was a detailed explanation you could pull up.

At the same time, they are very similar to star-trek. I would call it more like star-trek than "Rendezvous with Rama" by Artur C. Clarke (which wikipedia mentions as an example of hard sci fi).

I'm sure calling mass effect hard sci fi would annoy some slashdotters, but with an interactive media, there's different challenges. Perhaps "star trek level" is as hard sci-fi as anyone has figured out how to make a game and still call it a game, rather than an interactive science lesson.

I agree, Mass Effect 1 was actually decently hard sci-fi. And then it went flacid with the sequels. They figured stuff didn't need any explanation, and you know this RPG stuff is for pansies. Let's just shoot ALIENS!!!

About the only other game I can think of that would be somewhat close to "hard science fiction" that I can think of is SpaceChem, as you need to use a modified periodic table in order to complete the challenges... and the "back story" sort of reads like a poorly written science fiction novel. However that game gets so close to an interactive science lesson that some real-world brick and mortar schools have even the audacity to include the game in their curriculum.

Mass effect was pretty much the closest thing to "hard sci fi" I've encountered in a video game. A google search for "hard sci fi videogames" came up with two yahoo questions asking if there were any, mass effect was mentioned in both as the closest examples of it, so I'm not alone in that opinion. There was a scientific explanation in the codex (text that got added under a menu nearly every time you encountered something new in the game) that was surprisingly detailed. You could just play the game and igno

Having explanations for how things work which do not require handwavium (e.g. "element zero") or magic (e.g. "biotics") and which follow the known laws of physics makes scifi "hard".

Are you sure that's the actual, commonly accepted standard for what qualifies as hard sci-fi, or are you just saying you personally don't consider it hard sci fi if any fictional technology is featured? The wiki page goes on to say "Neither term is part of a rigorous taxonomy—instead they are approximate ways of characterizing stories that reviewers and commentators have found useful" so I'm not sure why element zero would necessarily move mass effect from hard science.

Of what relevance is it that Star Trek is harder than Star Wars? My best guess is you're just trolling Star Wars fans by saying it sucks, but the thing is, harder sci fi doesn't mean better sci fi, it just means harder sci fi. Although I disagree on your initial premise -- I think Star Trek and Star Wars are both about equally soft.

Star Trek does treknobabble to give the appearance of hard sci fi without the actuality. Star Wars dispenses with that (except the midichlorians fiasco, which was very Trek-ia

What, the translator droid is in their ears like a babel fish or something? Is there a scene where a droid is actually translating anything except for the Ewoks in the third movie? Luke/Jawas scene: No translating. Han/Greebo scene: No translating. etc.

Star Wars is just a war/samurai hybrid set in space. But then again, westerns was what fueled much of Star Trek.

The Luke/Jawas scene makes sense that their wouldn't need to be a translator. The Lars family dealt often with the Jawas who were one of 2 native species of tatoone. The fact that they understood each others languages, even if they couldn't speak them makes sense.

It's reasonable that these characters were fluent in more than one language. What needs explaining is why the conversations don't take place in a single language, but it might be that they knew the languages well enough to understand them when spoken, but not enough to speak them. Given the anatomical differences, this could be quite plausible.

After several weeks of trying to come up with a good name for the game, we finally decided not to learn from previous experiences and pick a name that's already kind of in use by a huge existing franchise.

After playing around with names like "Elight", "Wind Commander", and "Steve Online", we finally settled on the very catchy name "Mars Effect".

After several weeks of trying to come up with a good name for the game, we finally decided not to learn from previous experiences and pick a name that's already kind of in use by a huge existing franchise.

After playing around with names like "Elight", "Wind Commander", and "Steve Online", we finally settled on the very catchy name "Mars Effect".

The name may be a joke, but the game isn't. Notch has been doing some development work including creating a virtual machine that he claims to have on his development system running 4000 instances of that VM simultaneously with only 50% of his development machine CPU bandwidth in use. Some details about the VM can be found here:

He has been talking about this game for over a month, and a couple of days ago he tweeted out to his "fans" to give some name suggestions.

Almost everything on the "Mars Effect" website is pretty much a compilation of everything he has said about this game in terms of interviews, tweets, blog entries, and casual comments over a pint of beer in terms of his vision for the next big project he wants to be working on.

The game itself is very real, it is just that the name is something I strongly suspect and was something I noticed immediately after its name was announced. With Notch though, me might be saying "damn the torpedoes" and be willing to make everybody think it is a joke of a game too... if for nothing more than to get some fans off his back. Any time he makes reference to a website in his twitter feed, it often crashes to something like the Slashdot Effect in part because of how many people are following his tweets.

In particular, he started spec'ing a 16-bit processor (listed as a feature of this game) some days ago on his tumblr and twitter pages (its data format, registers, instructions, a "Hello World" program...).

If this is a 4/1 joke, it's a fairly elaborate and overengineered one. It's ok to me; I love overengineering.:)

Instead of noticing the obvious Mass Effect parody in the name and logo design, and the April 1st copyright date at the bottom, Slashdotters are zeroing in on...the classification of Star Trek as hard science fiction. Yeah, because THAT was the obvious tip-off.

I was actually buying it until I read that. That's not to say I had an extreme "omg that is so untrue that this must be fake" rection, it just knocked me out of my mindless daze long enough to notice the other (what should have been obvious) clues.

There is villager AI that is quite good in Minecraft. It is called "Millenaire" [minecraftforum.net] villages though, that are by far and away much more developed than the Testificates. Kinniken just added warfare between different villages and allows "the player" to be able to act as a diplomat to either fester hostilities or try to smooth over relations along with a rather complex inter-village trading system. The monetary system has been in place for quite some time, including some very awesome blocks. I love the Japanes

Minecraft mastermind Markus Persson wants to make his next sandbox game a space simulator that's equal parts Firefly and Elite.

Ain’t no problem in the ‘verse as bad as getting your space shipping lanes all set up and then having the whole thing torn down by hostile mobs of Reavers. Setting up those shipping lanes is half the f

What is this obsession with making digital circuits in Minecraft? I don't get it. If you want to simulate a simple digital circuit then use any of a number of free or student-version or pirated simulators. I thought at first that people were actually building simple mechanical computers, but it turns out that it's nothing of the sort.

Other than the fact that these "digitial circuits" can be used for things like serial data communications between train stations or constructing a device that will build you a house (or one of a couple different mobs) from source materials in the game.

There are practical applications for these circuits, and you can hook some kids into the basics of circuit design in a piecemeal fashion. Besides, where else can you be building a circuit design and you have to kill off real (virtual) bugs in order to get the

How about formalizing a set of interfaces for the modding community so they won't see all their hard work go up in smoke every time you release an update? Its really hard to explain to the kidlets that the 'Ooh yay, kittycats!' Minecraft update they downloaded broke all the mods they had installed.

Ha! I got sucked in by this until I saw the comments about April Fools!
Notch's fake game is similar to my Light Rising browser based mmorpg... http://lightrising.com/game/ [lightrising.com]
I was inspired by Elite, Sundog, and the Ultima aeries of games, along with the browser mmo Shartak: http://shartak.com/ [shartak.com]
I actually would really have enjoyed a Notch game like this, but oh well... I'm still hoping for the remake of Sundog!

The real April Fools joke is that their "serious" projects are just as laughable.

As much as I like Minecraft, I've certainly gotten my money's worth out of it, Mojang and Notch are one-hit wonders. It became all too painfully clear when they started rolling back their expectations of what Minecraft was supposed to be because they simply lacked the technical ability, resources, and motivation to accomplish their goals. Which of course didn't stop them from continuing to sell the game based on those promises

- Uses Java to release a game on several platforms at once without having to recode- Makes tens of millions of dollars- Generates burgeoning community of modders and players- Wins several major gaming awards including a BAFTA- Labelled as incompetent by random Slashdotter

Yeah, sounds like April Fools Day to me.

(Incidentally, if you're on a 64-bit OS, get the 64-bit version of Java. Any stuttering there was vanished completely for me.)

No, the point is that it was a success for the wrong reasons, and therefore it won't carry on to his future endeavours. I wouldn't go as far as to predict they'll go bankrupt but you have to admit Minecraft is still ridiculously unpolished for a "gold" game - chunks appearing/disappearing out of nowhere, the entire render thread hanging when it needs to generate terrain, etc, etc.

What are the wrong reasons? Was it not a fun, enjoyable, worthwhile game? Regardless of ignorable bugs (and I really mean ignorable, unless you have a speed hack on it's hard to move so fast that chunks fail to appear) then it seems to me like it does exactly what it's supposed to.

Having a couple of technical gripes about the game doesn't stop it being a good game.